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Battery problems, quirks and issues: Read first.

my battery life sucks. I can't even go all day and I disabled a bunch of stuff. I am running IM and other apps.....

I use the "Battery Graph" app and it's great for keeping track and seems very accurate.

Anyone have specific tips or tricks to improve battery life???
 
My battery life has gotten considerably worse the last few days, no idea why... ALL I did was start playing Parallel Kingdoms and BOOM, my battery is shot in 5 hours. Not like the game uses the GPS, keeps the screen on, and is constantly running data.
 
Hi, I'm an almost-owner of a new Moment, and I have been reading this topic for the past few days intensely looking at the solutions people have found to this battery/meter calibration problem, and I noticed that someone else had made a point that I do believe went unnoticed.

The point he brought up was the fact that if you do completely drain the Li-ion battery, it ruins it. I'm not super keen on battery tech, and how the internal mechanisms in the battery/phone work but I just want to confirm with others that there would be a cut-off mechanism to stop the discharge before it completely fails. If not, could the discharge work-around be harming the battery in the long run?

Thanks,
CMNDR
 
CMNDR. i'll let others comment as i don't know battery tech very well.

my battery has improved the past few days. i think the meter is definitely still flaky

using battery graph, i can see my battery starts out at like 75% seconds after saying 'fully charged' on a full wall charge. will check again tomorrow. also, there is no smooth transition between 40% and 15% it just veritcally drops, and then stays at 15% until it would roughly drop there on a smoother scale. very odd.

i also talked to sprint chat, they said if people open tickets/open chat and talk to sprint about the issue, the more people that do it, the more sprint will look into the issue. so everyone having this issue, call/chat to sprint and amybe something will be done.
 
CMNDR. i'll let others comment as i don't know battery tech very well.

my battery has improved the past few days. i think the meter is definitely still flaky

using battery graph, i can see my battery starts out at like 75% seconds after saying 'fully charged' on a full wall charge. will check again tomorrow. also, there is no smooth transition between 40% and 15% it just veritcally drops, and then stays at 15% until it would roughly drop there on a smoother scale. very odd.

i also talked to sprint chat, they said if people open tickets/open chat and talk to sprint about the issue, the more people that do it, the more sprint will look into the issue. so everyone having this issue, call/chat to sprint and amybe something will be done.
I have talked to sprint (stores and tech support) and samsung multiple times.. They say they are unaware of any problem with the moment.. Samsung offered to do extensive tests on my battery and phone but i wont get either back for 3 weeks (very unacceptable)... It looks like a charging cycle issue with the charging voltage being to high or could be a faulty power supply... going to wait til my 30 days are almost up and decide if i want to swap my moment for a hero, or swap it for another moment and see if that is any better... wish samsung or sprint would officially make a statement about it instead of burying their heads in teh sand..
 
cmndr,

I'm fairly confident that even though myself and others say we "drained" the battery, it's not like we ran it completely dead. I don't know of many battery technologies that work correctly if you just run them dead. Maybe marine deep cycle.

Anyways, what I and others did was "drain" it so the phone would not stay on more than a few seconds. I did that 3 total times and then charged the phone and each time it seemed to help the battery and the meter.
Then the idea of doing a top-off with USB came about and I tried it. It works. I also tried to top off by just unplugging and replugging in the charger. It works also.

As time has gone on, I've found better success using USB only as opposed to wall chargers. The USB having a lower ma output for me seems to fully charge the phone better.
I'm now planning on getting a low ma output wall charger cause the phone for me seems to charge more completely that way. Watching battery graph, there is really not a big difference in charge times using lower ma output and certainly not a concern overnight.

Also, the phone just seems to get better for me as I use it more. Yesterday for example, I unplugged at 7am and used it more for data and played a few games. Ended up talking almost an hour or so and at 9pm, battery meter was reporting 40%.

One thing I noticed on a co-workers moment the other day was their END button was not programmed to put the phone to sleep. So I downloaded spare parts and set the end button function and his battery life improved that day.
 
Thanks satinkzo,
I figured that there was something preventing that but I was just wondering if anyone else had thought of this.

I'd also like to say thanks to you guys for being able to come together and find a solution. This has helped me a lot, and when I get my Moment on Sunday I'll know exactly what to do with it to solve this issue.

Thanks again.
 
Hey guys,

I got a new Samsung Moment after returning my old one. The old one had serious battery problems. The new one doesn't seem to at all.

The old one would drop to 80% soon after pulling it off the wall. The new one took 2 hours to hit that mark; The old one, when I listened to podcasts (using Google Listen, not downloading, just listening) dropped to about 40% after about 1.5 hours. The new one dropped to 80% after 2 hours (as I stated earlier). -- That's right the new one had 80% after usage, whereas the old one would get to 80% in a couple of minutes with zero usage!

This new phone is 1 day old and it gives me a lot of hope that the battery meter isn't collapsing. I haven't skimped on any of the apps either; I've installed everything I did on the old one, even more in fact (I now have the Facebook and Twidgit apps, which I didn't run on the old phone).

All I did differently this time was let it drain completely (where pushing the power button had no response from the phone) and then charge it to full using the wall charger, then the USB charger, then the USB charger, the USB charger, and so on until it read 4200 mV. Sometimes it will read 4000 mV and still 100% on the charger, but once you unplug it it immediately reads 90% -- I just unplugged it and recharged it. That is all the 'conditioning' I did.

So far, 8 hours off the hook, Spare Parts reports running for 2 hours 49 minutes (35%), screen on for 26 minutes, bluetooth on for 1 hour 58 minutes. So far, the battery reads 70%. I'm impressed with the results so far, because while the other phone got me through the day; it was at 5% by the time I got home and that with very very little usage.
 
Actually, it also occurs to me that while we may think of the battery meter being a big snafu and all, it may be that Samsung and Sprint are not aware of this problem because the meter that ships with the phone (i.e. without a third party add on) is very very vague about battery life -- showing only Green, Yellow and Red. I notice that it hits yellow at 15% and red at 5%. From a time point of view, this is about right -- as the phone lasts about 1/3 of the time on green, and 1/3 of the time on yellow (15%), and about 1/3 (perhaps less?) on red before dying with the dead battery symbol.

If we don't install a proper battery meter (I use the widget from Curvefish), it occurs to me that one would not see the meter as a problem at all. (Samsung has done a great job at hiding the actual battery percentage deep in the settings area, where I imagine very few people look.)
 
I just came from the Sprint Store and the Techs there seem to be aware of the issue. They swapped my battery out instead of the phone and said they will be willing to swap the entire unit out if the problem persists. I was told to make sure I charge this phone overnight. Ill report back sometime in the future.

How many think this is really going to solve the issue.
 
Just got back from best buy and they exchanged out my battery for a new one also, goona let fully drain then recharge fully pc usb hopefully it may be a bad battery
 
Ok. Well a change of plans, and I now have my new moment. I have fully drained the battery, and its charging as I type this message. I will repeat this two more times over the next two nights, and with any luck I can add another success to you guy's method. I'll keep you guys in the loop.
 
Ok well last night I charged up the phone and topped it off with USB. I took it off the USB before I went to sleep. I hit the red button to turn the screen off. I left Battery Meter running for the night and when I woke up it was still at 100%. The phone stayed at 100% with very little activity until 10:21 EST for a total of over 9 hours at 100% with little usage...

Its now holding at around 90%-80% with more usage than before. It seems to me like there was a big improvement on the battery.

BTW I am using Automatic Task Killer to shut off unneeded apps when I turn the screen off (hit the red button quickly). I also have Advanced Task Killer in the background just in case.

EDIT: What was that Handsent app you guys were talking about as a fix for the texting? I couldn't seem to find it in the market.
 
Ok well last night I charged up the phone and topped it off with USB. I took it off the USB before I went to sleep. I hit the red button to turn the screen off. I left Battery Meter running for the night and when I woke up it was still at 100%. The phone stayed at 100% with very little activity until 10:21 EST for a total of over 9 hours at 100% with little usage...

Its now holding at around 90%-80% with more usage than before. It seems to me like there was a big improvement on the battery.

BTW I am using Automatic Task Killer to shut off unneeded apps when I turn the screen off (hit the red button quickly). I also have Advanced Task Killer in the background just in case.

EDIT: What was that Handsent app you guys were talking about as a fix for the texting? I couldn't seem to find it in the market.

Handcent, try this spelling. Its very good.
 
Handcent, try this spelling. Its very good.


a little off topic but is the message app on the moment not letting the phone sleep like the hero ? for you guys or are you only using it for the lag you get sometimes with the moment messaging app ?
 
My battery life has gotten considerably worse the last few days, no idea why... ALL I did was start playing Parallel Kingdoms and BOOM, my battery is shot in 5 hours. Not like the game uses the GPS, keeps the screen on, and is constantly running data.

Mine has as well. Seemed like the first few weeks the battery life was excellent, sure the meter was wonky, but I couldn't kill the thing.

This past week, my battery life has taken a steep turn for the worse. Light usage and almost dead battery in like 5-6 hours. I just removed a bunch of my most recent apps and rebooted to see if it helps.
 
Wow my phone is jacked up. 5 texts, 4 two minute or less phone calls, and log on here and post this... %15 battery left. Took my phone off the charger around noon EST.

Something has gone seriously wrong. This is so weird. My battery was incredible up until this week. I just don't get it.
 
Day two has gone well with my moment. So well in fact, that I'm still hovering around 50% after what I would call normal use for 12 hours, and I don't see how or why i would need to run the battery down again. So instead ill just charge and top off with USB tonight and check back in tomorrow.
 
do you think it was the new battery or new moment. i can't see it being a moment issue if so many are having the problem?

also got that universal battery charger in and a spare battery. put an old battery off of a known working phone (and battery) in it. its a 1100 mA battery with 3700 mV. its charging at .08 A. its going to be a while. its been about 8 hours not and still not done. 80mA is way to slow to charge batteries.

in other news have tried all these top off methods and the like, no really affect. going to keep try draining it though. mine stays on 5% for so long. tried to kill it for a few hours now and no luck.
 
From what I've learned about li-ion batteries, the worst thing you can do to them is to fully drain them. They have a minimum level they need to be kept at (40% is a level I keep getting) ). You also do not want to over charge them.
 
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